Millions Like Us (54 page)

Tears of joy ran down my face. It was all coming to pass. The new world, the new day, was dawning.

For Nina, the promise of clear blue skies was being fulfilled.

Naomi Mitchison had come down
to Kettering for the count. Dick Mitchison won his seat with an impressive majority, and his wife and supporters were euphoric. As the scale of the Labour victory became apparent, Naomi grabbed a couple of gladioli from a vase on impulse and stuck them in her hair.

Some Tories, like Virginia Graham,
tried to see the funny side. ‘We went to the Ivy on Election Night so we all felt a bit giggly,’ she wrote to Joyce Grenfell, now back from the Middle East. But the fun of addressing her chums as ‘Comrade’ suddenly started to fall flat. ‘I
suppose that if the tumbrils are coming they make so much less noise than bombs we can’t treat them seriously.’ Others were less amused. The Conservative Member for Barrow-in-Furness had lost by 12,000 votes.
Nella Last called in
at the WVS; her organiser, Mrs Lord, was distracted with anxiety. No doubt about it, trouble was in store. There would certainly be civil uprising and riots now that the ‘soldier vote’ had trounced the ‘Tory dog’. Mrs Lord’s trembly voice rose in hysteria. Nella gave her two aspirins washed down with a little sherry in a medicine glass.

Ursula Bloom felt
full of dread. She feared for her country which was now going to be led by inexperienced politicians. State controls would foster inertia in men’s souls. And what presumption to treat her class as idle parasites. In particular, she felt affronted by the implication that she herself was a lady of leisure. She had worked hard all her life. It enraged her. To her, the ‘new world’ coming into being felt full of loathing and envy, and it was a world which she now had to grow old in.

The revolution had begun.

Little Boy and Fat Man

Politics were swept off the front pages thirteen days after the Attlee victory, when the morning papers carried news of the atomic bomb which had been dropped on Japan from those deceiving blue skies. A ‘RAIN OF RUIN’ had descended from the air, reported
The Times
on 7 August. Next day the
Daily Mail
told readers: ‘Hiroshima, Japanese city of 300,000 people, ceased to exist at 9.15 a.m. on Monday morning … While going about its business in the sunshine of a hot summer’s day, it vanished in a huge ball of fire and a cloud of boiling smoke.’ Three ladies from Southampton promptly penned a deeply felt outburst to the editor of
The Times
:

Sir, – The use of the atomic bomb on Japan must surely appal anybody whose natural feelings have not been entirely blunted by the years of war …

The argument that war can be ended by increasing the destructiveness of weapons has been shown again and again to be fallacious … It is for people everywhere to say: ‘This shall not be.’

Yours, &c., VIVIEN CUTTING; MAVIS EURICH; OLIVE C. SAMPSON.

‘It’s a new kind of bomb, darling, for the benefit of mankind.’ How could one explain the atom bomb to the next generation? What kind of world were they growing up in?

Their heartfelt letter was published on 10 August, the same day that the paper carried a shorter report of the follow-up attack: ‘ATOM BOMB ON NAGASAKI – SECOND CITY HIT’. The Americans had code-named their two nuclear bombs Fat Man and Little Boy; those who developed these unknowably destructive weapons did not, it seems, consider that they might possess any feminine attributes. On 14 August the Japanese surrendered.

Thelma Ryder felt
nothing but relief. The war was really over now, and Bill would be released.

I thought it was wonderful really, because we’d had enough of war. I thought – anything that will end any war, anywhere … After all, they’d asked for it hadn’t they? – you know, what with the terrible things they’d done. I know it was horrible for them, but it had been horrible for us too.

Many felt the same. ‘
At last, at long last!
The day we have waited for
nearly six long years has come round,’ wrote MO diarist Muriel Green. On Wednesday 15 August the flags and bunting came back out again, and happy crowds gathered in front of Buckingham Palace. The royal family made more balcony appearances, and more fireworks were let off down the Mall. There were bonfires, parades and street parties. Children were treated to unforgettable spreads: jellies, hot dogs and cakes.
Eileen Jones
, a twenty-three-year-old munitions worker in Eccles, Lancashire, celebrated by quitting her job. Her brother Albert had spent three years as a POW in the Far East. After five years of twelve-hour shifts drilling parts for submarines on inadequate pay, she’d had enough. Albert would be freed now, so she walked out, rejoicing.

But the obscene destruction caused by the atom bomb made it hard for many others to replicate the enthusiasm they had felt three months earlier on VE-day.
One despairing woman
took to her bed for a fortnight, and a respondent to Mass Observation wrote: ‘It casts a gloom over everything, and its terrifying possibilities make nothing worth while doing.’
Ursula Bloom spent
the morning of VJ-day rushing round Chelsea trying to buy enough bread to see her household through the holiday period. The shops were all shutting, with no information as to when they would reopen. Ursula was slipping ever deeper into a mood of profound gloom and fear about the future. Would mankind never learn? ‘Fear rose like a flagrant weed in our hearts. This was not victory!’
Nella Last felt
the same. ‘Tonight I thought of the dreadful new bomb – we will always live in the shadow of fear now … I’ve a deep sadness over my mind and heart like a shadow, instead of joy the war has ended.’
Frances Partridge,
who had felt a quiet elation after VE-day (‘surely it’s only logical that pacifists – of all people – should rejoice in the return to Peace?’) felt sickened when she read an account of the after-effects of the atomic bombs. Victims unhurt at the time of the explosion were falling sick, with bleeding, rotting flesh and nausea, followed inevitably by lingering death. What kind of world was her child growing up in? He was only ten …

I thought with despair of poor Burgo, now so full of zest for life and unaware of its horrors. My own instincts lead me to love life, but as I read on, a desire welled up in me to be dead and out of this hateful, revolting, mad world.

Shortly after the bomb was dropped,
the
Daily Mail
columnist
Ann Temple offered a ‘Woman’s-eye view’ of the new atomic age. Reactions to the cataclysm were, she argued, split along the lines of the conventional sexual divide: the male, as a natural hunter and killer, looked on with awe and exultation; the female, at heart a preserver, begetter and guardian of life, felt a deep fear. But women were also endowed with great intelligence and wisdom. Our nation would be short-sighted indeed if it failed to deploy these characteristics. In 1945, women’s increasing empowerment and influence gave only grounds for optimism. Today, the town council; tomorrow, who knows, the United Nations? Yes, women could save the world.

And yet the deeply embedded consensus that women’s proper destiny was wifehood and motherhood continued to block the way ahead. Churchill’s coalition had held out against all attempts by the female labour force to achieve equal pay with men. And when the scale of the British post-war economic calamity became apparent – for with the American lend-lease arrangement terminated the country was running on empty – the political patriarchy was in no mood to embrace sex equality in the workplace or anywhere else.

Haunted

On VJ-day Lorna Bradey
was invited to a celebratory party in her home town of Bedford. A huge bonfire was lit. Lorna gazed into its flames, absorbed by her private memories. Over five years of war, she felt she had lived volumes. 1940: Dunkirk – fleeing from the German invaders down the crowded highways of northern France as bullets sprayed the roof of their ambulance – Messerschmitts dive-bombing the decks of their fleeing vessel; 1941: the tropics, blue bays and jacaranda trees – Tobruk harbour, and the dawn escape across grey, foam-flecked seas back to Alexandria; 1942: Cairo and the desert, the background to a horrifying drama as she saved the life of her friend, bleeding to death after a backstreet abortion; 1943: Italy, the high emotions of the operating theatre at Barletta: amputations, burned-away faces – the parties, the kisses,
dancing with Henry on the Adriatic shore; 1944: Mount Vesuvius erupting, Capri …

I seemed to be standing on the outside looking in.

In August 1945 Lorna felt like a spectre at the feast.

For Phyllis Noble
the end of the war brought on an overwhelming existential melancholy. For two years she had been working as a meteorological observer in the WAAFs, during which time she became romantically entangled with a handsome navigator named Adam Wild. As ever, Phyllis was at the mercy of her emotions. Her love affairs were in a complete mess. She loved Adam and was sleeping with him, but Adam didn’t love her; meanwhile Philip Horne, a married officer at her Norfolk base, had declared his passion for her: ‘Forget that twerp Wild and marry me – when I’m free, that is!’ At the same time she continued to be haunted by the memory of her relationship with her earlier sweetheart, Andrew Cooper, to whom she had lost her virginity back in 1942. She knew Andrew still held a torch for her. In light of her other failed romances, she now hoped they might be able to pick up where they had left off.

But her hopes for a renewal were to be dashed. After VJ-day they met. It emerged that during the time they had been apart Andrew too had had one or two light-hearted relationships. Whether they were physical ones she did not inquire, but surmised that they probably were. In any case, they were both adults now, what was to be lost by being open about such things? So she told him about Adam Wild.

It was a mistake. Andrew reacted with resentment and dismay. ‘He had remained faithful to me and, in spite of everything, had hoped and believed that I would have remained faithful too.’ Later, she received a letter from him, telling her that she was vain, empty and superficial – a ‘despicable creature’ – and breaking it off for good.

Phyllis now felt utterly drained. The dislocations of war, her turbulent passions and her own lack of a personal compass had beached her. Dispersals of friends and family were upsetting; in 1944 a V1 had hit Lampmead Road, where her beloved grandparents lived. Though the poor old couple survived, their cosy home had been destroyed, aspidistras, ornaments and all: ‘It was the end of an era.’ The damaged remnants were carried on a handcart round to Uncle Len’s, and
Gran and Granddad sadly took up residence in a top-floor flat with no garden. Phyllis watched their decline with pity and dismay.

I fell into a mood of trepidation and gloom. I had recurrent nightmares about death, represented by skeletons and threatening people in black, and with so many people moving out of my life I felt bereft and uncertain about the future.

Peace, far from offering a new start, had slammed the door in her face.

Helen Forrester too
felt that life had been merciless to her, but on VJ-day she celebrated with the rest. The office workers at the Liverpool Petroleum Board were given a holiday, and Helen joined five of her single girlfriends. They smartened up – as well as they could, in their threadbare dresses and heavy utility shoes – and went out for a day’s fun. Along the way they found a friendly demobbed soldier to join their gang, and someone suggested having their picture taken. The soldier was just for show, unclaimed. Two of the girls were ‘fancy-free’, and two engaged. Another had lost the man she loved. Nobody except Helen was in mourning for two dead lovers. Later, the picture seemed to encapsulate that time when, after enduring six sad, bitter and laborious years, the wartime generation of women stood – wearing bright, forced smiles – on the threshold of a new world.

I smiled for the photographer, but I remember that I wanted to scream at the unfairness of life.

Surrounded as she was, Helen felt angry, lost and dreadfully alone.

*

There were 60,000 British POWs held in Japan, and by the beginning of September 1945 news began to filter through from officials that the camps were being cleared and the prisoners evacuated. By now it was also known that many of them had been brutally treated. Was George Symington one of them?
Monica Littleboy’s memories
of her tall, slim, handsome boyfriend with his cultured manners and easy charm seemed so long ago; 1939 was a world away. In 1945 Monica was starting a new life; she left the FANYs, went to London, secured a promising job as a programme assistant with the BBC and began
dating a confident, attractive man who also worked in radio. Then, one evening in the autumn of 1945, the telephone rang at her digs. The operator put through a call from Southampton Docks. Disbelievingly, she heard the voice of George Symington:

It was as if a life had suddenly come back from the dead … a voice from the past …